Don Quixote Dies at the End
by simplyprologue
Summary: A man dies. The mission lives on. (One-shot. Post 3.05)


**A/N:** Well, I could go to sleep before writing a post episode fic for "Oh Shenandoah", all things considered. And then I woke up and posted it because things finished at 4:30 AM should not be put onto the internet without someone proofing it. Thanks to Pippa for doing that.

* * *

><p>It feels foretold. Don Quixote, after all, dies at the end. Or so Will tells himself, staring at his hands in the back of the car. MacKenzie's cries grow louder, less controlled, and he hasn't been stable in weeks but he can lace their fingers together and hope that it's enough to get them through the ride to the apartment.<p>

"They said—Nancy said he's been sick awhile," Mac says in-between gulps of air, looking to him. "We knew that. He's been off, forgetting things and not acting right—"

"Yeah."

They had said.

_He was an old man who was delusional. He thought he was a knight. _

Don Quixote dies at the end.

Of a goddamn heart attack, just like—

Will recognizes that he's laughing, that Mac is squeezing his fingers tightly and asking him to talk to her because not only is he laughing, he's crying.

"I didn't get to say goodbye. Again. A heart attack. Again. I just—what the fuck, Mac?" His voice is low and breaking softly, nearly foreign to his ears after fifty-three days in solitary talking to himself, hearing his words form against cinderblock. Carefully, well-constructed. And now this.

Sniffling, she angles herself closer, pressing in until she's almost in his lap.

"He knows you loved him," she murmurs. "And he loved you. It's not the same."

Forcing himself to look at her (the car pulls into Columbus Circle, to Central Park South and they're nearly home, and he has no idea what it looks like except _finished _and he no longer has any inclination to find out tonight) Will kisses her at last. Cups her chin and brings their mouths together, his thumb stroking over a damp cheek.

It lasts a moment.

But Mac understands.

He pulls back only slightly, resting his forehead against hers. Their faces this close in the dark vehicle makes his vision hazy, but he sees more tears spill, wipes them away.

"I know," he says eventually, as the car comes to a stop.

They get out.

Enter the lobby.

Take the elevator to their floor.

His mind processes it in tiny increments.

Touch-starved, he reaches for Mac constantly, and she obliges. Then the thought, like punctuation: _Charlie is dead. _He's wearing the clothes he was married in, and they're soft and there's nothing of the scent of the laundry detergent their services uses on them but they're his, so much better than the prison uniform. _Charlie is dead. _He can use his own toothbrush and toothpaste. _Charlie is dead. _Hungry, he can walk into the kitchen and get anything he likes. _Charlie is dead. _

"Well, it has walls and electricity now," Mac says, voice small and defeated as she flips on the light switch. "Your two requirements."

Her attempt at brevity for them both lingers, flickers briefly, and then dies.

They set it aside, and say nothing else.

Will drops his books onto the dining room table. The spine of the bottom one cracks, the top cover skewing. The photographs fall out.

He was eight, there. It was right after strike one (a regular occurrence in their house, his father's fist cracking across his mother's cheekbone, a regular occurrence but his mother screamed loud enough that the police came) and three months in the county jail. And Dad had gotten out of jail and wanted to _make it up to all of you_ and it was stupid and he had learned not to trust him, even at eight, and it took four months for fishing trips to turn back into being heckled from the recliner as Dad held a bottle in his fist.

It was a reminder.

As good as things may get, they will never remain.

Strike two happened that autumn, in front of the wrong neighbors, a shouting match over the price from the miller that Mom was forced to accept after a bad harvest. It had quickly turned into a beating yards from the road.

That was five months.

Strike three was three years later, and he broke a bottle across his father's face for dragging his little sister across the floor by her hair.

_It seems you had to protect your mother and sisters from a pretty violent father. Do it again. _

Fifty-three days in prison.

Neal will come home from Venezuela.

"Honey?" Catching him staring at the picture, Mac curls her fingers around his wrist and tows him away from it and into the living room, where there are no longer any exposed beams and there's floor and furniture. Then, eyes darting uncertainly, "Why don't we—?"

There's nothing she can suggest that won't sound absurd.

He laughs.

"I know."

"The staff is still at Hang Chews, if you want to—"

_Do it again._

Groaning, he scrubs his hands over his face. "I should, but I think I might—"

"It's nothing that can't wait until morning," she assures him. "No one's expecting you to be anywhere but here tonight."

"Prison, probably," he quips reflexively.

To make her giggle.

It works, her eyes glowing in the dim light before she bites down on her lip, silencing herself.

"We could go to bed. At least you should change out of those clothes."

And then he starts to fight her, because MacKenzie has only known about the most recent absurd balancing act of the universe for two and a half hours longer than him and she needs someone to lean on, even if he's only had eleven (much closer to forty-two, if he was counting) minutes of practice in being her husband.

When her hands come to the collar of his shirt, smoothing out the shapeless fabric, he puts his hands on her waist.

"You said you were there."

Her hands pause, and then continue their movements, now mechanic and stiff.

"Mac—"

"I don't want to talk about," she says, not snappishly, which he could handle. Instead her eyes fill with tears again, and her face is already red and swollen and he remembers that she's two and a half hours ahead on crying, too. Looking down, she grips the front of his shirt.

Under his fingers, she's trembling.

"Mac."

"Charlie's dead," she says, still not looking at him. "Charlie's dead and I—the past two months have been hell and we've just—"

A sob swallows her voice.

He leads her into the bedroom and sits her down on top of the mattress.

Takes off her shoes, her skirt, her jacket, her blouse.

Joins her bed in his boxers and his undershirt.

In between thoughts the sheets are almost uncomfortably luxurious, and he remembers them by the color and the cut that they're the ones that he wanted but Mac didn't, but here they are on the bed anyway. His nightstand is arranged the way it was in the old apartment, and he figures if he got up to look at the bookshelf opposite them and in the closet the same terms would apply and he fits his arms around MacKenzie tighter as she cries, and waits for his turn.

In all honesty, he's in shock.

This is the least he can do for her, after leaving her for fifty-three days.

Then, like punctuation: _Charlie is dead. _

And so is John.

"I didn't get five words from Charlie until 9/11," he tells her when her cries don't quiet. A story, so when they have to trade places she can tell hers. "And by then he'd already run opposition research. Found everything about my dad. I went from one manipulative drunk to another, but Charlie was Charlie and he…"

There's a way to be a father.

Charlie knew how, in a way that Will can honor his mistakes.

He doesn't find a way to finish his thought.

_Charlie is dead. _

"He was the only one who would hire me," Mac says, not lifting her head from where she's dampening his shoulder. "And he said… _MacKenzie_, he said, _I started drinking when I came back from the war. I'm putting you back in a control room with that jackass we both love. It'll do you better than bourbon. _And I—told him no, to be honest."

His fingers tangle in her hair in his haste to cradle the base of her skull in his hand.

"What made you say yes?" he rasps, his other hand coming to cup her hip.

Swiping under her nose with her hand, she rolls onto her back, and shrugs.

"He didn't give up on me." Then her eyes water again, and she curls her fingers over her eyes, hiding her face. "He was the only one who didn't. For a few weeks—"

Shrugging again she tries to stop-gap her tears and he pries her hands down, collecting her back into his arms.

"For a few weeks, he was all I had. Jim was with his family and I was in DC, for an interview that I wouldn't—and Charlie flew down to see me," she explains, voice cracking over hard vowels and cresting over consonants, growing more and more frantic. He found me in my hotel room, with the curtains drawn, hiding in bed contemplating how the hell I was going to keep going. Then he called me Dulcinea and I—"

"I know."

Will has no idea how to assure of that. But she's not alone.

He knows.

"Charlie knew how to make you know he was on your side. Even if he was scolding you like one of his—"

"Wayward children?" Mac suggests.

_Your dad was a drunk._

"Yeah."

It's his turn for his voice to break.

Pillowing his head on her breasts he tries to breathe, his shoulders shuddering. He made it fifty-three days without breaking, and now he shatters with the sound of his own unmeasured breaths.

He tries to talk.

"The three years you were gone, he was the only reason I—"

When someone's dead you get to see the body, so that it's tangible. And Don Quixote died surrounded by Sancho and Dulcinea and his family, all except him.

He didn't cry over his Dad.

Silent sobs wrack his body and just present enough, he wonders if his arms are wrapped around Mac too tightly, if he's pinning her to the mattress and he's spent the past fifty-three days with nothing to do but pushups and sit ups and the rest of the regimen from when he played football and if he hurts her now—but her hands are drifting through his hair, and her hiccupping breaths slow to the point where she's finishing her story and trying to calm him to the point where he can finish his.

"He's the reason we're—"

She stops, and he nods, hugging her tighter.

"Charlie only ever wanted for us to be happy."

"Safe," Mac amends, the tiniest tremor in her voice. "We're going to have to, with him gone, it's gonna be you and me—"

"We'll keep them safe."

_Do it again._

It feels foretold.

Charlie is dead, and without him neither of them would have come back. It's too easy to imagine an emptied bottle of Vicodin, an extended contract into another violent corner of the world. Two people wandering into early deaths.

More of their clothes come off, all of them, until they're pressing their limbs to lock together. Not everything has been said but the hour is too late and neither can sleep, so Will flexes his hips into hers, leaving open-mouthed kisses down her sternum, to her breasts. Then further down, laving the flat of his tongue against her folds until she shakes, and then suckling kisses, tasting her, until her fingers knot into his hair and push his head away.

"Should we?"

This is purposeful, because there were _plans _two months ago. But now all has been taken and upended and he wants this, but if she doesn't after what's happened it's only entirely logical, even if he's more certain now than he was before that he can do this.

But she nods.

"We should," she murmurs, leaning up to capture his lips.

And that's the end of it and its nearly laughable how much better shape in his is now than before going to jail but he still winds up collapsed on top of her, trying to catch his breath. Gently, he pulls out of her, wincing when she does, and rubs his thumbs in circles into the reddened insides of her thighs.

Looks up, sees Mac's eyes are closed, her cheeks wet. With nothing to say, kisses the corner of her mouth.

"At least we won't be fighting over names now." Struggling, she manages to smile. "No repeating the seven weeks of invitation hell."

It's foretold.

Don Quixote dies, but the mission is born again.

* * *

><p><strong>Thanks for reading!<strong>


End file.
